Inside the Insurance Repair Machine: How a Claim Becomes a Contract

Insurance companies mostly do not choose contractors. They outsource claims handling to a third-party administrator or a loss adjusting firm, and that firm runs a managed repair network which holds the vetted contractor list and assigns each job by postcode and trade. The decision that puts work in front of you sits two or three layers below the insurer on the policy.

That gap between who people think decides and who actually decides is why this channel looks closed from the outside. It is not closed. It is just that most operators are knocking on the wrong door, and the right doors are not the ones with the famous names on them.

How do insurance companies choose contractors: the four-layer chain#

Follow a burst pipe from the moment it is reported and you can see every hand it passes through.

Layer one - the insurer. Takes the premium, carries the risk, and in most cases does not want to run a repair operation. Its interest is settling the claim at the lowest defensible cost with the fewest complaints.

Layer two - the TPA or the loss adjuster. The insurer hands the claim to a third-party administrator (Claims Consortium Group, Davies Group) or to a loss adjusting firm (Sedgwick, Crawford, QuestGates). This layer validates that the loss is covered, agrees the scope of works, and controls the spend. Its people decide what gets repaired and to what standard.

Layer three - the managed repair network. The adjuster or TPA needs bodies on site, so it runs a network of pre-vetted contractors. Crawford's Contractor Connection is the best-known in the UK and describes itself as the largest independently-managed network of its kind here, built from a handpicked group of UK contractors and sitting inside a global Crawford network of over 6,000 vetted firms across five countries. Sedgwick runs its own certified contractor network. QuestGates acquired the loss adjuster TSS along with its contractor network, Artemis Repair, which does restoration fulfilment at the point of claim.

Layer four - you, and then your subs. The network contractor takes the assignment, and unless they self-perform every trade, they subcontract the plastering, the drying, the electrics, the decorating. Restoration majors like BELFOR and Polygon sit here too: they handle the drying and the strip-out and then buy in the reinstatement building works.

The work is real, and it is nowhere near where most people look for it. It is dispatched by companies whose customers are insurers, not homeowners.

Why the machine exists at all#

Understand the economics and everything about how this channel behaves stops being mysterious.

An insurer facing a £100 repair has two ways to settle it. It can hand the policyholder cash, or it can send a contractor.

Cash looks cheap and often is: a cash settlement typically will not include the VAT the policyholder would have paid on repairs, which is an immediate reduction of around a fifth in what leaves the insurer. It also transfers the entire quality problem to the customer, who then owns the job, the trade and the outcome.

Managed repair works differently. The insurer buys the repair through a network at network rates rather than at retail, and the industry's own illustration of the gap is roughly £60 of insurer cost for £100 of retail-valued work. In exchange the insurer takes on responsibility for the standard of the repair and for putting defective work right - which is exactly why the network vets so hard before it lets anyone in.

Three consequences follow from that, and they are the three things every operator entering this channel gets wrong:

• The rate is a schedule, not a quote. You will be priced against the network's rates. You are being bought at wholesale because the insurer's whole reason for using a network is that wholesale is cheaper than retail.
• The vetting is not bureaucracy for its own sake. The insurer has taken on liability for your work. The credentialing, the annual re-certification and the performance monitoring exist to manage that liability.
• The volume is the product. You are not being sold a job. You are being sold a stream, in exchange for the margin you gave up at the rate.

If you cannot explain why the insurer is paying less than retail, you will not survive the rate. The discount is not an insult, it is the whole business model.

Where the doors actually are#

We track 557 UK work-winning gates in our own directory, and 23 of them sit in the insurance repair and facilities management channel. Split them properly and the picture sharpens:

• Ten are the insurance-repair chain proper - the TPAs, the loss adjusters running repair networks, the restoration majors that subcontract reinstatement, and the claims project managers who build through local approved contractors.
• Thirteen are FM giants and integrators - a genuinely different channel that runs on planned and reactive maintenance contracts, not claims. Adjacent, worth knowing, not the same machine.

Of those ten, four have a public front door: an application form on their own site that any competent firm can complete today. Sedgwick takes service provider applications through an embedded form on its managed repair network page. Contractor Connection runs a "join the contractor directory network" application. Claims Consortium Group has a direct application form into its Synergy platform. Aspray, which project-manages claims through local franchisees and builds via approved contractors, takes open registrations.

The other six have no public form at all. QuestGates has no signup page for Artemis - the route is a direct approach to its building consultancy side. Innovation Group, which describes a UK network of over 700 trusted repairers, registers interest through its contact route and onboards to its own gateway platform once you are approved. BELFOR has no UK vendor portal; you ask for a subcontractor packet. Polygon has no supplier portal either. Davies publishes no contractor network page. Rainbow Restoration has no central portal at all - its roughly 60 franchise branches vet locally, so it is sixty conversations, not one application.

That is the actual shape of the opportunity. Four doors you can walk through this afternoon, six you have to go and find, and the six are where competition is thinnest precisely because there is nothing to click.

What the machine checks before it lets you in#

Across every network in this channel that publishes its requirements, the ask is consistent and it is front-loaded:

• SSIP-level health and safety accreditation, or a named scheme. Constructionline and SafeContractor come up repeatedly. Constructionline's smallest band runs £319 for Bronze and £599 for Gold at current pricing, plus a £99 joining fee; a SafeContractor-type certification sits somewhere around £400 to £700 a year depending on size.
• Full insurance - public liability and employer's liability at the levels the network specifies, evidenced, in date, and named correctly.
• Financial standing. Contractor Connection's credentialing explicitly covers financial stability alongside licensing and insurance. Networks are choosing who to expose their client to.
• Ongoing performance. Sedgwick monitors contractor performance after joining and re-certifies annually. Getting in is not the finish line; the scorecard is.

None of that is negotiable and none of it is fast. Budget the accreditations before you budget the revenue.

How this fits a subcontracting model#

I run this model myself: win the work, subcontract the delivery, keep the spread. Insurance repair is one of the cleaner channels for it, with one hard condition.

The condition is that the spread has to survive the schedule of rates. If your only way to make a job pay is to be on it yourself, a wholesale rate will eat you. If you can price a job properly when you are subbing the work out and you have a sub bench deep enough to cover the volume, a thinner spread across steady dispatched work is a perfectly good line of business.

Two practical warnings from the mechanics above.

First, cash flow. You are paying subs on your terms while being paid on the network's, and network payment runs through a validation process that has more steps than a private client's bank transfer. Model the gap before you take volume, not after.

Second, insurance. The liability the insurer took on flows down to you contractually, and defective work you have already been paid for is work you will be going back to. Check that your cover actually matches what you are signing, including the levels the network specifies rather than the levels you happen to hold.

Treat this as one line in a mix. Our own writing over on Contractor Club has gone through the rates and payment-terms trade-off in detail for operators weighing whether the channel is worth it at all - the question this post deliberately leaves alone, because the point here is the structure rather than the verdict. If you want the model this all sits inside, start with what construction arbitrage is and how the spread is supposed to work before you go chasing a channel that compresses it.

The next step#

The chain is public. Which doors are open this quarter, who is actually onboarding rather than just collecting applications, and what members have been offered on rates - none of that is published anywhere, and it changes constantly.

Last checked: 28 July 2026.